nytimes - alessandra stanley
im not completely sure what the point of the article was, but it is amusing - particularly about the grey's anatomy viewers. :)
You Are What You Watch
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 23, 2007
What do you watch?”
It is no longer a lazy way to redirect a boring conversation. Questions about viewing preferences have become fraught; the topic is as intimate, revealing and potentially off-putting as discussing how much money you make.
It’s a rich television age and a demanding one. The selection is now so plentiful and fragmented and good. And deciding among hundreds of channels, on-demand options, DVR, Internet streaming and iPhones requires so much research, planning and commitment that viewers have become proprietary about their choices. Alliances are formed, and so are antipathies. Snobbery takes root. Preferences turn totemic. The mass audience splintered long ago; now viewers are divided into tribes with their own rituals and rites of passage.
Some people swear allegiance to “Mad Men,” the sleek and brooding AMC series set in the Madison Avenue advertising world at the tail end of the Eisenhower administration. Others find that show’s aesthetic stinting and too trendy, and argue that the summer’s best new offering was instead “Damages,” the legal thriller with Glenn Close on FX. And even that show has caused rifts between those who live for Ms. Close’s “Devil Sues Prada” star turns and others who think its plot is too knotted up with wretched portence.
“Lost” on ABC still finds devotees, but the momentum of the masses has switched to “Heroes,” which has mystique with fewer layers of mystification. Even some of the people who say they don’t watch television make an exception for “The Wire,” on HBO. “Prison Break” on Fox has a small but impassioned following, but so does Bravo’s “Project Runway.” Over at NBC “The Office” is one of the best comedies on television yet the truly finicky insist it can’t hold a candle to the original British version starring Ricky Gervais. “30 Rock” has a fervent fan base, but it excludes viewers who don’t keep up with Page Six. Besides, a lot of people swore off sitcoms when Fox canceled “Arrested Development.”
A favorite show is a tip-off to personality, taste and sophistication the way music was before it became virtually free and consumed as much by individual song as artist. Dramas have become more complicated; many of the best are serialized and require time and sequential viewing. If anything, television has become closer to literature, inspiring something similar to those fellowships that form over which authors people say they would take to the proverbial desert island. (People who say “Ulysses,” on the ground that it would use up more time than almost any other novel, would also probably bring “The Wire.”)
Some events are momentous enough to draw everyone’s attention: the enigmatic finale of “The Sopranos” or a celebrity perp walk. But mostly, television is a toppled Tower of Babel, scattered snatches of conversation about a multitude of shows. Talk show hosts and media critics fret over whether “Kid Nation,” a reality show now on CBS that put youngsters through a 40-day “Outward Bound/Lord of the Flies” learning experience, constitutes child abuse. On a smaller scale, the pot-dealing suburbanites of “Weeds” on Showtime and the apologia of torture on Fox’s “24,” even advance word of the yet-unseen “Pushing Daisies” on ABC, ignite spirited discussion on blogs, in hair salons, car pools, at dinner parties and even in university towns, where fewer and fewer people claim never to watch television.
This doesn’t mean that the era of network television as a national shared experience, when everyone watched, say, “Roots” or “Dallas,” is over. Certain shows, most notably “American Idol,” bring together a huge audience, most of its members young enough never to have heard of Ed Sullivan or remember a time when you could watch “Bonanza” only on Sunday nights at 9 or else wait for a summer rerun. But it’s the lesser-known series that inspire the most fervid loyalists. Fans overrode CBS’s veto of “Jericho” last spring, bringing it back after the network canceled it because of insufficient ratings. In this Balkanized media landscape, viewers seek and jealously guard their discoveries wherever they can find them.
It’s not an obvious leap from “The Sopranos” to the Sci-Fi channel, but a friend who was bereft after that HBO series ended was steered to the new incarnation of “Battlestar Galactica,” a cult series about a fleet of starships seeking to escape the robot race of Cylons and find refuge on a fabled, lost colony known as Earth.
Science fiction is one thing: “Battlestar Galactica” has intellectual cachet.
“The humans are pagan polytheists and the robots are monotheists, whose divine jihad is against the humans (even though the former know that the latter created them),” Anthony Gottlieb, the author of “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” explained off the top of his Blackberry from an airport baggage claim. “There’s a curious mix of high-tech and superstition and scriptural fundamentalism (which interestingly suggests that religion is ineradicable, as today’s theorists of secularism are increasingly saying).”
Mr. Gottlieb likes the philosophical puzzles (“Some of the robots think they are human, and some of the humans fear they may be robots”) as well as the way the show switches sympathies back and forth from democracy to dictatorship. He really had only one objection. “There’s lots of romance, though this bores me,” he typed. “Less kissing, more killing is a frequent internal refrain of mine.”
This summer “Mad Men,” rippled across my world in ever-widening circles of connoisseurship. We were entranced by the amber-colored look at the early 1960s, when men drank martinis at lunch, and housewives smoked at P.T.A. meetings, and the battle between the sexes had barely begun. Michael Hainey, the deputy editor of GQ, is enamored of the way the series captures the finer details in a lost moment of American overconfidence. “It’s a period piece that’s about right now,” Mr. Hainey explained. He also loves the show’s look and feel, which he described as “ ‘The Apartment’ meets ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.’ ”
Other friends are addicted to “The Closer” on TNT and imitate Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern loop-the-loop lilt (“thankyousoverymu-uu-ch”). Almost everyone I know watches some form of “Law & Order” at some point in the week. As a professional viewer I watch the reruns with Jerry Orbach as a palate cleanser, something light and soothing between review tapes.
Generation DVR doesn’t know what a new fall season means or how to keep appointment television. I know this because I have a 14-year-old daughter who sometimes consents to serve as an ambassador to Planet Youth. “There is no one cool show, “ she recently snapped. “Everybody watches different things. I can’t help you.” (She did provide a few clues: “Smart” kids watch “House” and “The Office,” while teenage girls who aren’t afraid of seeming, as she put it, “lobotomized” watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” )
Teenagers are not the only ones with shameful habits hidden in their closets. Most people have shows they admit to watching only after a self-deprecating preamble that frames the speaker as charmingly eclectic, and not merely a lumpenviewer. People have become curators of their own television consumption, seizing lofty rationales for why they keep tuning into “American Idol,” (cultural anthropology) or Nascar (just anthropology).
More offbeat shows, like “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel or even “Timeless Romance Jewelry” on QVC , are not embarrassing; they fall into the category of whimsical distraction.
It’s the mass-market fare that is harder to explain.
Many people in the culture department of this newspaper never watch television unless it’s an adaptation of a George Eliot novel on Masterpiece Theater. But one of the smartest editors I know once admitted, after a few drinks, to going into his study when no one else was around and watching “Reba.” I am paid to watch television, and proudly keep one television set on at all times as a kind of eternal flame, a memorial to all the shows that were canceled. The critic’s code of honor is “no show left behind.”
I am not ashamed to say I try never to miss “Mad Men” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock” and also “House” and “Sleeper Cell.” I have a harder time admitting that I also sometimes record “NCIS” and “Jag.”
Before the Internet, iPhones and flash drives, people jousted over who was into the Pixies when they were still a garage band or who could most lengthily argue the merits of Oasis versus Blur. Now, for all but hardcore rock aficionados, one-upmanship is more likely to center around a television series — like metaphysical clues buried in “Lost,” whether the current “Battlestar Galactica” is an affront to the 1978 original (some bloggers sneeringly refer to the current incarnation as Gino, short for “Galactica in name only” ) or who discovered “Flight of the Conchords” when it was a comedy team performing in concerts, not an HBO series.
Television used to be dismissed by elitists as the idiot box, a sea of mediocrity that drowns thought and intelligent debate. Now people who ignore its pools and eddies of excellence do so at their own peril. They are missing out on the main topic of conversation at their own table.
You Are What You Watch
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 23, 2007
What do you watch?”
It is no longer a lazy way to redirect a boring conversation. Questions about viewing preferences have become fraught; the topic is as intimate, revealing and potentially off-putting as discussing how much money you make.
It’s a rich television age and a demanding one. The selection is now so plentiful and fragmented and good. And deciding among hundreds of channels, on-demand options, DVR, Internet streaming and iPhones requires so much research, planning and commitment that viewers have become proprietary about their choices. Alliances are formed, and so are antipathies. Snobbery takes root. Preferences turn totemic. The mass audience splintered long ago; now viewers are divided into tribes with their own rituals and rites of passage.
Some people swear allegiance to “Mad Men,” the sleek and brooding AMC series set in the Madison Avenue advertising world at the tail end of the Eisenhower administration. Others find that show’s aesthetic stinting and too trendy, and argue that the summer’s best new offering was instead “Damages,” the legal thriller with Glenn Close on FX. And even that show has caused rifts between those who live for Ms. Close’s “Devil Sues Prada” star turns and others who think its plot is too knotted up with wretched portence.
“Lost” on ABC still finds devotees, but the momentum of the masses has switched to “Heroes,” which has mystique with fewer layers of mystification. Even some of the people who say they don’t watch television make an exception for “The Wire,” on HBO. “Prison Break” on Fox has a small but impassioned following, but so does Bravo’s “Project Runway.” Over at NBC “The Office” is one of the best comedies on television yet the truly finicky insist it can’t hold a candle to the original British version starring Ricky Gervais. “30 Rock” has a fervent fan base, but it excludes viewers who don’t keep up with Page Six. Besides, a lot of people swore off sitcoms when Fox canceled “Arrested Development.”
A favorite show is a tip-off to personality, taste and sophistication the way music was before it became virtually free and consumed as much by individual song as artist. Dramas have become more complicated; many of the best are serialized and require time and sequential viewing. If anything, television has become closer to literature, inspiring something similar to those fellowships that form over which authors people say they would take to the proverbial desert island. (People who say “Ulysses,” on the ground that it would use up more time than almost any other novel, would also probably bring “The Wire.”)
Some events are momentous enough to draw everyone’s attention: the enigmatic finale of “The Sopranos” or a celebrity perp walk. But mostly, television is a toppled Tower of Babel, scattered snatches of conversation about a multitude of shows. Talk show hosts and media critics fret over whether “Kid Nation,” a reality show now on CBS that put youngsters through a 40-day “Outward Bound/Lord of the Flies” learning experience, constitutes child abuse. On a smaller scale, the pot-dealing suburbanites of “Weeds” on Showtime and the apologia of torture on Fox’s “24,” even advance word of the yet-unseen “Pushing Daisies” on ABC, ignite spirited discussion on blogs, in hair salons, car pools, at dinner parties and even in university towns, where fewer and fewer people claim never to watch television.
This doesn’t mean that the era of network television as a national shared experience, when everyone watched, say, “Roots” or “Dallas,” is over. Certain shows, most notably “American Idol,” bring together a huge audience, most of its members young enough never to have heard of Ed Sullivan or remember a time when you could watch “Bonanza” only on Sunday nights at 9 or else wait for a summer rerun. But it’s the lesser-known series that inspire the most fervid loyalists. Fans overrode CBS’s veto of “Jericho” last spring, bringing it back after the network canceled it because of insufficient ratings. In this Balkanized media landscape, viewers seek and jealously guard their discoveries wherever they can find them.
It’s not an obvious leap from “The Sopranos” to the Sci-Fi channel, but a friend who was bereft after that HBO series ended was steered to the new incarnation of “Battlestar Galactica,” a cult series about a fleet of starships seeking to escape the robot race of Cylons and find refuge on a fabled, lost colony known as Earth.
Science fiction is one thing: “Battlestar Galactica” has intellectual cachet.
“The humans are pagan polytheists and the robots are monotheists, whose divine jihad is against the humans (even though the former know that the latter created them),” Anthony Gottlieb, the author of “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” explained off the top of his Blackberry from an airport baggage claim. “There’s a curious mix of high-tech and superstition and scriptural fundamentalism (which interestingly suggests that religion is ineradicable, as today’s theorists of secularism are increasingly saying).”
Mr. Gottlieb likes the philosophical puzzles (“Some of the robots think they are human, and some of the humans fear they may be robots”) as well as the way the show switches sympathies back and forth from democracy to dictatorship. He really had only one objection. “There’s lots of romance, though this bores me,” he typed. “Less kissing, more killing is a frequent internal refrain of mine.”
This summer “Mad Men,” rippled across my world in ever-widening circles of connoisseurship. We were entranced by the amber-colored look at the early 1960s, when men drank martinis at lunch, and housewives smoked at P.T.A. meetings, and the battle between the sexes had barely begun. Michael Hainey, the deputy editor of GQ, is enamored of the way the series captures the finer details in a lost moment of American overconfidence. “It’s a period piece that’s about right now,” Mr. Hainey explained. He also loves the show’s look and feel, which he described as “ ‘The Apartment’ meets ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.’ ”
Other friends are addicted to “The Closer” on TNT and imitate Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern loop-the-loop lilt (“thankyousoverymu-uu-ch”). Almost everyone I know watches some form of “Law & Order” at some point in the week. As a professional viewer I watch the reruns with Jerry Orbach as a palate cleanser, something light and soothing between review tapes.
Generation DVR doesn’t know what a new fall season means or how to keep appointment television. I know this because I have a 14-year-old daughter who sometimes consents to serve as an ambassador to Planet Youth. “There is no one cool show, “ she recently snapped. “Everybody watches different things. I can’t help you.” (She did provide a few clues: “Smart” kids watch “House” and “The Office,” while teenage girls who aren’t afraid of seeming, as she put it, “lobotomized” watch “Grey’s Anatomy.” )
Teenagers are not the only ones with shameful habits hidden in their closets. Most people have shows they admit to watching only after a self-deprecating preamble that frames the speaker as charmingly eclectic, and not merely a lumpenviewer. People have become curators of their own television consumption, seizing lofty rationales for why they keep tuning into “American Idol,” (cultural anthropology) or Nascar (just anthropology).
More offbeat shows, like “Mythbusters” on the Discovery Channel or even “Timeless Romance Jewelry” on QVC , are not embarrassing; they fall into the category of whimsical distraction.
It’s the mass-market fare that is harder to explain.
Many people in the culture department of this newspaper never watch television unless it’s an adaptation of a George Eliot novel on Masterpiece Theater. But one of the smartest editors I know once admitted, after a few drinks, to going into his study when no one else was around and watching “Reba.” I am paid to watch television, and proudly keep one television set on at all times as a kind of eternal flame, a memorial to all the shows that were canceled. The critic’s code of honor is “no show left behind.”
I am not ashamed to say I try never to miss “Mad Men” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock” and also “House” and “Sleeper Cell.” I have a harder time admitting that I also sometimes record “NCIS” and “Jag.”
Before the Internet, iPhones and flash drives, people jousted over who was into the Pixies when they were still a garage band or who could most lengthily argue the merits of Oasis versus Blur. Now, for all but hardcore rock aficionados, one-upmanship is more likely to center around a television series — like metaphysical clues buried in “Lost,” whether the current “Battlestar Galactica” is an affront to the 1978 original (some bloggers sneeringly refer to the current incarnation as Gino, short for “Galactica in name only” ) or who discovered “Flight of the Conchords” when it was a comedy team performing in concerts, not an HBO series.
Television used to be dismissed by elitists as the idiot box, a sea of mediocrity that drowns thought and intelligent debate. Now people who ignore its pools and eddies of excellence do so at their own peril. They are missing out on the main topic of conversation at their own table.
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